The start of political junkie season

We've all enjoyed the leadup to the primaries, but the real hot season for political junkies starts tonight with the Iowa caucuses. The primaries will start coming fast and furious after this one, and we can all watch the press coverage, polling and other tea leaves for signs of where the momentum is headed and what stories are moving the voters. I live for this stuff every election, and will probably play absolutely terrible poker tonight because I will be far too concerned with knowing what's happening in Iowa. But the good news is that finally all the prognosticating and strategizing and talking out of asses will be drowned out by the deafening sound of real people voting and making their feelings known. And that's always very cool, even when you don't agree with the outcome.

I may not have said this here much before, but my entire family is from Iowa. My mother was raised on a farm in a small town called Klemme, and my dad grew up all over the midwest but spent much of his childhood in Cedar Rapids. They met at a small community college after my dad flunked out of U of Iowa, his father's alma mater. While they married in Minnesota at Mankato state, our family's roots are very much in the state of Iowa and I still have great uncles and cousins who live there. I have very warm memories from summers as a very small child on my grandparents' farm in Klemme. I remember picking blackberries and raspberries, and playing with the farm kittens (including one that I named Hamburger King because he loved raw hamburger.) I remember my great aunt Darlene's house with the tire swing and the room filled with dolls. I remember riding the John Deere tractor and seeing the sheep in the pen in the back of the house. I remember falling down the stairs of that old farmhouse at about aged 3, and the smell of the root cellar where I would go get popsicles from the freezer. And though I do not remember it, I have heard the story so many times of the day I went to carry eggs back in from the henhouse and dropped one on the ground and kneeled over to see what was inside ("a peach!" I told my mother) that my brain has almost tricked me into remembering it.

Because I still remember Iowa, and because I see so much of it in my family, I always have a little soft spot in my heart for the Iowa caucuses. The quaintly complicated methodology, the level of commitment that Iowans have to show if they want to register a vote, the no-nonsense views they hold and the way they carefully and methodically inspect and mull over the candidates, much like they would a cow they're considering buying. To the people who whine about it being an arcane procedure, you simply don't understand why it's the way Iowa will always do things: Because they always have. And because it works.

I don't know who will win tonight. The polling seems to show a clear trend towards Obama, with secondary help for Edwards and some last minute movement away from Hillary Clinton. But polling in this contest is notoriously difficult, and even relying on crowd size is tricky since so few of the people who could caucus will actually take the time to show up. My hunch is that Obama will win but that it will be close. Either Edwards or Clinton could place second, and I think all will be within 5% points of each other. The most important question is likely to be how the media spins the results, and if they drive the momentum in a particular way with their coverage. (Remember the scream in 2004? That was less about the weirdness of the scream itself and more about the aftermath of all the bad press it got, coupled with the "suddenly Kerry looks like a winner" spin he took out of Iowa.)

But don't let the media fool you into believing Iowa doesn't matter at all. It always has some impact, even if just short term. And stories that lament that we give an early voice to this midwestern farm state with its strange rules and paltry voter turnout do a disservice not only to Iowans, but to the political process. The beauty of having Iowa and New Hampshire go first is that both are filled with surprisingly frank and honest voters. They are no bullshit people. They take their obligation to judge a candidate seriously, and if you can package it and sell it in Des Moines and Nashua, then you can package it and sell it anywhere.

For what it's worth, my family is also all Republican except for me. And I was chagrined to learn that my grandparents appear to like Mitt Romney, though my grandmother is also interested in Mike Huckabee. That fits with the polling, so perhaps you can take the grandparents out of Iowa, but you can't take the Iowa out of the grandparents...